“... on their own deadlines to discuss their common quarry with him. All this activity may puzzle the lay person. Holden’s final pages report Olivier alive, as well as can be expected at 81, residing tranquilly in the Sussex countryside, still swimming occasional lengths of his pool in the altogether and attending the first nights of the three children who have ...”

“... obviously forthcoming you would nevertheless feel that the possibility of a thorough explanation lay somewhere within the comprehensive world of its realism. The subject of every canvas by Constable, you could say, is the commonplace and the deep emotional satisfactions of the ordinary: ‘My limited and abstracted art is to be found under every hedge,’ he ...”

“... to fashion, a tradition Brogue editors have, for the most part, happily upheld. Her tendencies lay avant-gardewards; sufficiently so that Nast got jittery and shipped her off to New York to learn publishing his way before she’d even begun (his approach was: know your audience). British Vogue’s official history begins not with Todd, or her temporary ...”

“... Manhattan’s Café Bizarre, when an already enormously famous Andy Warhol (and his canny manager, Paul Morrissey) arrived to offer them a deal. Warhol was in need of music. He, or Morrissey, seems to have known of the group through the overlap between the underground film world and the avant-garde musicians who worked as accompanists. Warhol put them on a ...”

“... who can’t see beyond the Georgians, as when he recommends to those unable to read Sanskrit Paul Deussen’s 1897 translation into German of Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad, where the ‘fable of the meaning of the Thunder’ can be found. His note, on the other hand, on Tiresias (the blind ancient Greek prophet who had been both man and woman) suggested a way ...”

“... that are undimmed in this final volume. There are other works on the same theme, for example, Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (1976) and Ben Wilson’s lively Empire of the Deep: The Rise and Fall of the British Navy (2013), but these shorter works concentrate on high power politics rather than the inner workings of the Royal ...”

“... on. In minutes of a meeting in 2013 that I got hold of through a freedom of information request, Paul Edwards, the council’s point man on the project, described it as ‘a poor design solution’. It’s easy to see that it wouldn’t have pleased Newton either. The houses would have been more expensive, and their unusual appearance would have advertised ...”

“... and beautiful’), starting early and returning late: ‘we climbed part way up a hill and lay in the grass for a couple of hours in the sun eating candy and talking.’ Eileen had no axe to grind, which made her a rare bird among the expats in Barcelona and may have accounted for her charm in Charles and Lois’s eyes. For all their zeal, they were a ...”

“... pals from choir or band or football club, labouring brothers, are induced to volunteer. They lay down the plough, the blacksmith’s hammer, the slaughterman’s knife. Intoxicated with blood-and-flag rhetoric, tales of atrocities committed by a bestial enemy, they willingly march off. Dreams of posthumous glory. A memorial in the village church. The ...”

“... the largest in Africa – wheeled about to tackle the Eritreans. As it advanced, Soviet gunboats lay off the coast and shelled the Eritrean fighters evacuating Massawa. The Eritreans called it a ‘strategic withdrawal’, but more than 25 years later one of them admitted to Wrong that ‘it was a complete defeat, a defining moment.’ The very prospect of ...”

“... confrontation with slow-burning loss (‘I came to grief late in life’ are the opening words) of Paul Bailey’s Gabriel’s Lament. There’s no mention in Porter’s book of those five stages, and the idea of ‘moving on’ from grief doesn’t get much of a look in. When friends (those unreal people, murmuring soothing advice into a smoking ...”

“... a girl with a hand-knit tourie. Throughout the boat, muzak was playing. Old Christmas hits. Paul McCartney. The only place you could avoid it was a lounge with subdued lighting and big reclining chairs. There were prints on the walls, a set of three, showing a cartoon sea with a stripy lighthouse, a fishing-boat, and below the blue waves, three ...”

“... cries Louie … confessing to his young son the shabby sexual adventure that he engaged in as she lay on her deathbed: ‘That may mean, will mean, little or nothing to you, my only child, reading this document.’ To Bellow, it meant everything. Again, the stylistic equivalent of an operatic curtain, coming down grandly on a fiasco. Used in a context as ...”

“... As Louis MacNeice lay dying in 1963, his last major work, a radio play called Persons from Porlock, was broadcast by the BBC. It is about a painter called Hank, who starts well in the 1930s, but whose development, as MacNeice explains in a note, ‘is interrupted by the war . . . Subsequent interruptions and frustrations include those occasioned by the lure of commercial art, by drink, money troubles and women ...”

“... replaced by the editors of Granta and Varsity, who had an eye on Fleet Street and were keener on lay-out than content, and by producers and actors determined to storm the RSC. He writes with sense and sensitivity of the student unrest which, in the Sixties and early Seventies, changed the relations between dons and undergraduates. But does he not think it ...”